As a photographer, Ansel Adams is known for two things: his devotion to nature in its pure state and his equal devotion to technical perfection. His desire to totally control how his prints looked and his drive to spread his technical knowledge led him to create his famous Zone system, an infallible process of making perfect black-and-white images with every gray clearly delineated.

As a result of his phenomenal success, however, Adams has come down to subsequent generations as something of a square. He achieved perfection, and then he achieved it again and again. In the popular imagination, Adams was a rigid perfectionist who was uninterested in trying out new ideas. Like most popular myths, the truth is far more complex.

Generally, people who are involved with technology don't give up their interest once they have found what they need for their own work. They have a curiosity about the latest technological developments. I wonder, were Adams alive today, would he be a video artist? Would he be involved in digital projects? Would he make color photographs?

The truth is that Adams took a lot of color pictures, not that any are in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition. Adams was a commercial photographer, and he made color images for the ads of his clients, among them Kodak, the Curry Co. of Yosemite and several San Francisco stores. Most were landscapes, like his serious work, but many were color.

"No artistic photographer in history has had so great a command over technology as Adams," said William Turnage, a longtime friend of Adams', trustee of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust and the man who helped Adams make a living from his photography at a time when few photographers could. "He was the best printer ever. The Zone system he created in the '30s and codified in the '40s was the most influential system in photo history."

Turnage said that Adams was totally involved with the process from conception through printing to reproduction and that one of his major contributions was to teach others how to manipulate the product. "The only reason he didn't get into color seriously was because of the difficulty of controlling the process. In those days, if you made one small change to make the sky more blue, it could make the grass turn pink," Turnage said. "Adams was concerned about color's lack of permanency and that reproduction quality was low."

Turnage also pointed out Adams' life-long involvement with science and technology, not something many of his fans, who might see him as spending all his time contemplating existence on a mountaintop, would suspect.

"Adams was among the first photographers to understand the computer's potential," he said. "He was deeply plugged into the scientific community. He had one of the first IBM PCs. He was one of the first art photographers to make Polaroid prints, and he was Polaroid's science adviser for 30 years. He saw in computers the opportunity to totally control the medium. He used Photoshop before it even existed. Around 1980 he said to me, 'If I were a young man today, I would be a color photographer because you can control the process today because of the computer.' "

What would Adams think about young photographers like Germany's Andreas Gursky, who use the computer to seamlessly manipulate a print, creating exciting images but also confusing viewers about the veracity of what they are seeing?

"Adams would have been blown away by Andreas Gursky," Turnage said. "He probably would want to be doing the same sort of thing if he were alive."